Do you think we should have strong or weak conformance to the theme?

Okay, as we head into the re-design of the newsletter, I'm going to post some questions that we can vote on. None of these votes are binding in any way, but it's good to get a feel of what people are thinking.

My first question is, "when we redesign the newsletter, should we have strong or weak conformance to the theme?"

I couldn't think of a better way to word it, so let me explain what I mean.

Strong conformance to a theme is what we have now. Every section is expected to essentially look the same. The section headers all use the same font and basically the same graphic with a slight variation in colour. The advantage of strong conformance is that everything contributes to the "branding" and ties everything together in the mind of the reader.

Weak conformance to a theme would be where the various sections are allowed to go in different directions with their headers and other graphics. That would somewhat weaken identity of the Dispatch as a cohesive whole, but it would allow more creative license to the artists and to the section editors. It would also help those readers who are only interested in one thing. For instance, if someone only comes to read Clan news, they would know instantly which section is the Clan section without even reading the title. Some kind of common feature would be used to tie the whole thing together, but the differences would be greater than the similarities.

"Something in between" is fairly self-explanatory, and so is "Don't know/don't care."

I voted strong because trying to read everything with different formats/ themes could be a big headache. Unless you go away from the website format and towards an actual, school physical newsletter, pdf-like style.